For those wondering what Vireio Perception's fate is, we have an update! The above is a benchmarking sample of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor running with the lowest in-game quality settings followed by the highest. The test equipment in this case is an AMD FX 8350 CPU mixed with an AMD R9 390 series GPU.

With the most basic visual quality, the game performs at 60FPS, and drops off to 44FPS in true stereoscopic 3D mode. With the highest graphics quality settings, the game again performs at 60FPS, and drops to 33FPS in stereoscopic 3D mode. This doesn't take into account techniques like asynchronous timewarp to compensate for missing frames in VR.

Why is this so important? It's DirectX 11 with full stereoscopic 3D support. When we say full stereoscopic 3D support, we mean unique left and right eye rendering. This should not be mistaken for 2D+Depth which strips away most of the magic that stereoscopic 3D has to offer to virtual reality.

Special thanks to Denis Reischl for making DX11 look so good! There are still visual artifacts that haven't been optimized yet, and the biggest innovations haven't actually been revealed yet. Everyone will just have to be patient! ;-)

For those unfamiliar, Vireio Perception are free open source virtual reality drivers that make it possible to take existing games and play them in VR. It's not quite native support, but when things are running nice...they look nice!